page_title: Hope (painting)
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Hope (painting) / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Platinotype reproduction of George Frederic Watts's Hope (1886)
context_page_description: Hope is a Symbolist oil painting by the English painter George Frederic Watts, who completed the first two versions in 1886. Radically different from previous treatments of the subject, it shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre that has only a single string remaining. The background is almost blank, its only visible feature a single star. Watts intentionally used symbolism not traditionally associated with hope to make the painting's meaning ambiguous. While his use of colour in Hope was greatly admired, at the time of its exhibition many critics disliked the painting. Hope proved popular with the Aesthetic Movement, who considered beauty the primary purpose of art and were unconcerned by the ambiguity of its message. Reproductions in platinotype, and later cheap carbon prints, soon began to be sold.
  Although Watts received many offers to buy the painting, he had agreed to donate his most important works to the nation and felt it would be inappropriate not to include Hope. Consequently, later in 1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a second version.
context_section_description: Although Victorian painting styles went out of fashion soon after Watts's death, Hope has remained extremely influential. Mark Bills, curator of the Watts Gallery, described Hope as "the most famous and influential" of all Watts's paintings and "a jewel of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist movement". In 1889 socialist agitator John Burns visited Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel, and saw a photograph of Hope among their possessions. After Henrietta explained its significance to him, efforts were made by the coalition of workers' groups which were to become the Labour Party to recruit Watts. Although determined to stay outside of politics, Watts wrote in support of striking busmen in 1891, and in 1895 donated a chalk reproduction of Hope to the Missions to Seamen in Poplar in support of London dock workers. (This is believed to be the red chalk version of Hope now in the Watts Gallery.) The passivity of Watts's depiction of Hope drew criticism from some within the socialist movement, who saw her as embodying an unwillingness to commit to action. The prominent art critic Charles Lewis Hind also loathed this passivity, writing in 1902 that "It is not a work that the robust admire, but the solitary and the sad find comfort in it. It reflects the pretty, pitiable, forlorn hope of those who are cursed with a low vitality, and poor physical health".
  Henry Cameron's platinotype reproductions of the first version of Hope had circulated since the painting's exhibition, but were slow to produce and expensive to buy. From the early 1890s photographer Frederick Hollyer produced large numbers of cheap platinotype reproductions of the second version, particularly after Hollyer formalised his business relationship with Watts in 1896. Hollyer sold the reproductions both via printsellers around the country and directly via catalogue, and the print proved extremely popular.
caption: Platinotype by Frederick Hollyer
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